"Although many of the jobs in the RNAi industry will closely resemble positions in other industries--biochemists, molecular biologists, and pharmacologists will be in demand--some specializations will be particularly sought after."

"As soon as some conference deadline comes up, you see us working like maniacs to finish … papers, just like we did when we were in school." --Henrique Malvar, the director of Microsoft's Redmond research lab

"There isn't a pharmaceutical company that doesn't want these people. [Fellowship participants] are getting calls from headhunters 6 months or a year before they've finished." --Dave Flockhart, professor of medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine

"If some significant fraction of the NIH budget is going to large-scale projects, and a substantial fraction of each project's budget goes into informatics, that translates into a lot of jobs." --David States, professor of bioinformatics, University of Washington

Malik goes to seminars to learn not just what they're doing, but how they're approaching questions. "It's really exciting to see how this person went about developing the story and making these connections . . . It's really useful to see how a scientific mind thinks about a particular problem."

Duties might include tracking and analyzing foreign weapons systems and capabilities; coding and maintaining weapon system simulations; C and C++ programming; keeping tabs on foreign threat capabilities against ground, naval, air, and space weapon systems; or maintaining contacts with counterparts elsewhere in the intelligence community and in government and industry.

You don't have to pay any of the money back, the government won't ask for equity in your business, and you keep full control of the intellectual property that you develop. Venture investors--if you can find any--will not be so kind.

I knew a little molecular biology, but I had no notion of what you could do experimentally. It reminded me of electronics, the idea that you had these tools to splice things together in an ordered way, that you could reengineer things in the cell to do something else. --Mark Goulian